Posts tagged with Miles Van Ppelt

Miles Van Pelt recently shared some tips for learning Biblical Hebrew. If you’re thinking of learning Hebrew, you’ll want to take a look at what he says. And don’t forget to check out his Biblical Hebrew online course.

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When you’re studying a language, it’s always good to have a study group or a partner.

We recently sat down with Miles Van Pelt to discuss learning biblical Hebrew online.

Here is what he said:

One of the things that is difficult about studying the Old Testament is it represents a culture that is far away in terms of its time and in terms of its practices.

77.3% of our Bible appears in Hebrew. So if we want to know what the Bible says, and if we want to know how to accurately communicate what the Bible says, then we will learn the language in which the vast majority of the Bible was written.

Hebrew has this way of connecting us back to that culture, connecting us back to their idiom, connecting us back to their way of thinking.

Aramaic was the lingua franca in the Ancient Near East for more than two thousand years. It was first spoken by the Arameans around 1,200 B.C. Then, when the Assyrians conquered the Arameans and brought them into captivity, they brought their language with them. From that point on, Aramaic replaced Akkadian as the language of commerce and government in Assyria and beyond.

After the collapse of the Assyrian empire, the Babylonians and Persians inherited the language. With each successive empire, Aramaic was exported throughout conquered territories and people groups.

When it comes to advice for students trying to master, let alone study and grasp, the biblical languages there is no small amount of solid, reliable advice for students.

Yet in our video today Miles Van Pent, professor of Old Testament and Biblical Languages at Reformed Theological Seminary and author of Basics of Biblical Hebrew Grammar, offers us a two-meal helping of solid biblical languages advice he got and wished he would have gotten—advice I wish I would have gotten, too!

His sage wisdom centers around the priority we give to studying biblical languages and the priority we give to the primary text itself: